duan

can i be honest - i'd be way more upset with him going to the phillies or the braves. fuck the yankees but we only play 'em 6 times a season and the chances of us having to beat cliff lee to win the world series involve us getting to the world series. it does make you think that the whole playing thole up here might have been a last minute attempt to flutter our eyelashes at the mariners into making them think he's a genuine catching prospect.

i take full responsibility for this loss. I fell asleep to gary coen saying (I think) first 8 batters retired and thought, "this is gonna be a fucking no hitter i must try and stay awake"

only issue with this is that it's hard to believe that this mets team is as good as 88, 00 or 86 and therefore it seems likely that we'll end up more along the lines of .650 at home with a bit of regression.

and here was me expecting this to be about chip hale's propensity to send or hold runners!

latos is pretty good at holding the runner.

traditionally you're giving the catcher the day off the day game after a night game. that's now out the window so you giggle things around as you see fit. don't see why blanco's hitting in the 8 slot though.

Ceetar wrote: duan wrote: can't find that pagan one for love nor money, maybe it wasn't him. Last Friday, Dickey gets a hit scoring Tejada, Reyes gets a hit. 1st and 2nd, no outs. Pagan takes the first pitch call strike, then gameday lists the second pitch as 'foul bunt'. Don't know if that was an attempt at a hit or not, but giving up the second strike puts you in an 0-2 hole and makes it unlikely you'll succeed. (he GIDPd) I feel like I've noticed indecision within AB before as it pertained to bunting, and I can't imagine it helps the batter to switch philosophy's halfway through an AB. that was the one. makes sense now cause I also saw where Dickey did the butcher boy thing and presumably they were two at bats apart.

yes it is.

can't find that pagan one for love nor money, maybe it wasn't him.

there was definitely a failed one by Pagan in a game i watched last weekend I think. Came on a 1 strike count which someone in Fox thought was interesting cause both managers had told their guys to take a strike before putting bunt on. there was also RA Dickey's butcher boy hit. Maybe it's the whole having a guy who can hit and when he does hit it go for extra bases more then once in a blue moon in the 2 slot that's the key.

I can't help but remember Mark Prior on May 22nd 2002. IP H R BB SO 6 4 2 2 10 against another incarnation of the pirates

Vic Sage wrote: All we're talking about in this thread is revisionist history, about which move would we want to undo. Certainly, the Bay/Middlebrook deal, in retrospect, was a bone-headed trade of youth for age in desperate and failed attempt to stay in the race, during the Steve Phillips `02 implosion. let us be clear about this, Jason Bay bounced around plenty - he and our lunatic 12th bullpen arm - were traded to the Pirates for a 2 month rental of Brian Giles, but long before that we'd acquired him from Montreal along with someone else for Lou Collier (hey JCL was that our mulligan?) Middlebrook wasn't *old* for a pitcher, he was 3 years older then Bay, he was decent enough that the Padres wanted him back off us after we got him off them.

what's a roll block?

by the way frayed, I know my post may seem to have broken your rule, but the way I looked at it it didn't. There was a moment, when Phillips & Wilpon decided "we're not going sign A-Rod now lets try and figure out a spin that makes it look like it wasn't about money" to my mind that was the strategy that I wouldn't have done.

Edgy DC wrote: I don't anticipate that happening, but I'm certainly with you. I kind of like the balls-out roster management that will occasionally lead to somebody playing awkwardly out of position once in a while. It makes them human. But I don't think most managers like it. there's an understandable reluctance by managers & gm's to take a risk with something that can go wrong and *BE SO OBVIOUSLY TOTALLY YOUR FAULT* ie: Castillo's pop drop last year was terrible, but it didn't cost Omar/Jerry their job. If Daniel Murphy had done it having been shunted into 2b for a week rather then Alex cause he could hit while Castillo was having a case of the owies then that might cost you your job. I'm not saying it's right. If LaRussa wasn't LaGenius he'd have copped way more shit for that 20 inning piece of crap then he did.

I'd have paid the money to A-Rod. Or at least negotiated in an honest endeavour. 10 years for 250 million was a very very very fair deal.

yes, that's probably true. Do you reckon if they moved Wright to the 2 hole (which was mentioned) they'd have him bunt every time Jose was on base too?

the problem with Cora is Jerry putting him at the 2 slot just because that's what his brain tells him is the perfect place for a guy who "knows what to do" with the bat. Is it not obvious to anyone that we should be going Reyes, Pagan followed by some form of Bay/Wright/Davis followed by Catcher/RF (order dependent on groove) then 2b

Ceetar wrote: err..what' is "nuanced reporting?" and why does what Steve Trachsel did a decade ago have any real relevance on Ollie? I'm sure I could give you dozens of examples where a guy struggled in the rotation, went to the bullpen or had a skipped start and found himself in the rotation again. Didn't Carlos Zambrano already go Rotation->Bullpen->Rotation this year? them be adam rubin's words, but I'd suggest that he's inferring that a few reporters have talked to Boras and going by what they've alluded to that off the record Boras has acknowledged that he's been trying to talk Oliver Perez into it. No idea whether that's true but that's what I'd read between the lines.

attgig wrote: so, going by the showbiz correspondent analogy of demeaning and underminding ollie's career, can ollie say... be put in as the catcher and have him catch dickey one batter, and then catch some fastballer? or if it's the major league lifestyle, if he's not promised nice hotel rooms in his contract, can they make his room be the best western across the street? or the locker room attendants maybe not do his laundry or accidently change the back of his jersey from perez to isuck? or how about the guys who think he's a ahole for not accepting a aaa assignment maybe screw with him? look I'm not arguing that Oliver Perez comes out of this well, I just think it's too simplistic to say "he should just accept going to AAA" as if it's a capital crime if he doesn't. I do worry that if Omar isn't able to make it happen there's something deeply fucked up in his relationship with Oliver Perez where he's not able to explain how it IS a good idea in a convincing enough matter, but we don't know what they're saying to each other either.

well this has already come up in Mr Rubin's chat. "Brian (NY, NY) Adam, Ollie Perez is a capitalist in a capitalist society acting in his own best interest, just like Fred Wilpon, Omar Minaya, and Derek Jeter. Going to the minors is not in his own best interest. Any capitalist who argues otherwise is a completely hypocrite, yes? Adam Rubin (11:57 AM) Fair point. Shame on the Mets for signing Oliver Perez to a three-year, $36 million contract. He has a CBA-bargained right not to go to the minors -- and if he doesn't want to, the Mets have the choice to release him or carry him on the roster. I will say Steve Trachsel a decade ago had success rediscovering himself in the minors. And based on some nuanced reporting, you can almost assume Scott Boras, Perez's agent, feels like Ollie might be better served in the minors for a little bit."

put aside that the money is telephone numbers. you're contract with your employers states that you are going to be employed to do one thing. They say, we're not happy with how you're going and we're going to send you to Middle of Nowhere, New York State to see if you're still good enough. You say, I'm good enough, I just need time to work through it. They say, you're not. You say - you don't want me pay me what I'm owed and let me go. In some jobs they'd call it constructive dismissal. I'll give you an example, a journalist in an Irish national daily was their "showbiz" correspondent. It was a job he liked a lot, and he was on very good money. Things were going well- so well that rather then have him jumps ship, the Newspaper offered him a fixed term contract. Editor changed and he thought said 'showbiz' correspondent wasn't performing. Showbiz Corr tried to change his style, Editor still didn't like. What could editor do - he was paying this guy over 100k and his gig was that. I'll tell you what Editor could do. He could send him to do court reports in rural ireland, because the contract didn't specify the role. He knew that by doing this the Showbiz guy would have two options. Have himself demeaned and his career undermined or walk away. He walked away. Oliver Perez' union has negotiated a situation where you can't do what that Editor did when you sign a certain type of contract and to be honest, in the context of what those union members go through when they don't control their own labour situation I think it's more then fair.

thing is, someone needs to go to Oliver Perez' agent and present to him a cohesive plan that involves a net gain to his client. The person who needs to do that is Omar Minaya as he's the one who's signed him. If Omar can't come up with something that's going to end with a positive for Perez then we're at a dead end. You say Perez is being selfish by not going to the minors. He says, hang on a second, I signed a deal to be on a Major League roster, that's the promise I was given, I you don't want me on yours, there's people who'll have me on theirs (hey there would be if he only cost 450k) who'll believe in me and let me start and find my groove - the self same groove you were so f'ing thrilled about 2007. Am I better off having the indignity of staying in the Minor Leagues for the rest of the season or going to (lets just say) the Royals and strating 20 more games? Oliver just signed the contract he didn't force the mets to offer it, he's just forcing them to honour it. (FWIW - I can't believe that someone isn't able to work through the process with him in a convincing manner that'll allow him to retain dignity the obvious parallel is Traschel but lets not forget Roy Halladay went back to have a mechanical tune up earlier in his career too.)

anyone else having problems with the mlb.tv feed on the web?

he's a dude. plain and simple.